Notes of an invisible writer

JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824) is a marvel of literary survival: a French savant and occasional civil servant who spent his life preparing to write a book. Instead of the great philosophical work he had imagined, he left to posterity some letters and 200 small notebooks filled with spare, conscientious musings over 40-some years. When his writer friend Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand edited the notebooks and privately published them in 1838, 14 years after his death, Joubert became the talk of literary Paris.

Given the numerous editions and translations of Joubert’s notebooks since then, one might expect them to be full of saucy details, insights on tumultuous times or accounts of his many literary friends. But his was not a diary, nor, like philosopher Blaise Pascal’s “Pensees,” a disordered set of notes for a specific unfinished book. In fact, “the work he left behind escapes clear definition,” American novelist, poet and essayist Paul Auster writes in the introduction to this reprinted edition of his lucid, affectionate translation of “The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert.” “[H]e has continued to exist as an almost invisible writer ... acquiring a handful of ardent readers in each generation, but never fully emerging from the shadows that surrounded him when he was alive.” Born to a surgeon and his wife in Montignac in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, Joubert gravitated in his 20s to Paris, becoming a member of writer and philosopher Denis Diderot’s circle. Joubert’s sympathies for the French Revolution died early, and he lost his enthusiasm for politics. (“The revolution chased my mind from the real world by making the world too horrible for me,” he wrote.) Still, when he was elected a justice of the peace by his hometown folk in 1790, he dutifully served one term.

After declining to stand for reelection, Joubert withdrew, becoming a modest but cherished figure in overlapping literary circles (critic Jean-Francois de La Harpe and poet Louis de Fontanes were among his close friends) and continuing preparations for his great book. He stocked his library with an idiosyncratic selection of mostly ancient authors. (“The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old books,” he wrote.) Joubert pursued his reading as lovingly and diligently as his daily note-taking. “He let nothing escape him,” as one early translator wrote, “treasuring what was excellent [in books], and remembering resentfully what was harmful.”

Joubert’s notebooks include his daily observations on manners, natural philosophy, religion, the workings of the mind, friendship, aging and literature (although his long notes on his readings are not included in Auster’s translation). Gradually, we see him realizing that his jottings are not leading toward some larger book. “These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work,” he reflected, “but of my life.” There are neatly drawn maxims (“Don’t cut what you can untie”); some offer metaphors (“Eye is the sun of the face”). Others, devoid of context yet elegant in their concision, read like tantalizing fragments of the Greek poet Sappho: “They are born old,” “He must confess his darknesses” or “Where do thoughts go? Into the memory of God.”

Joubert’s notebooks also reveal his personality, but in the most incremental and circuitous ways. There’s so little detail of daily life that it is striking when a tidbit breaks through: “At ten o’clock this evening. My poor mother! My poor mother!” His notes can be sprightly or withering (“When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do”). Only rarely are they witty, except when writing about the French national character: “In France we seem to like the arts more to judge them than to enjoy them.”

Read chronologically, as Auster presents them, Joubert’s notebooks show him moving from early idealism to the sagacity and moderation of his later years, when he applauds the foolishness of lovers and asserts that “every excess is a mistake.”

English poet and critic Matthew Arnold has compared Joubert to poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but argued that the Frenchman had more tact and penetration. What Arnold couldn’t have known then is that Joubert’s prose -- he disciplined himself to write clearly, without philosophical jargon or ornament -- would remain eminently readable today. Curiously, Joubert’s chief literary gift was compression -- a paradox that leaves us with his limpid notes instead of a brave, imperfect masterpiece. “Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page,” he remarked late in life, “a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word.”

When Auster first published this translation in a small-press edition in 1983, it attracted a single review. Yet when it fell into the hands of a friend of a friend -- one copy made the rounds of a New York hospital ward -- it became so popular that the patients refused to return the book.

What is there to love in Joubert? His consistency, his moral balance, his curiosity and his insistence on finding and plainly speaking the truth. It helps, perhaps, that the author’s unfulfilled ambitions -- palpable every few pages -- were realized indirectly after his death, so that instead of a cautionary tale for writers, Joubert is a posthumous wonder.

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Regina Marler is the editor of “Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex.”